Demigod: A new day

By Frogboy on May 4, 2009 11:24:27 PM from

Our story so far...

The initial release of Demigod was marred due to us not taking into account pirates trying to get validated when we set up our network infrastructure. This resulted in the multiplayer game being basically unplayable which resulted in some pretty negative first day reviews.

48 hours later, we set up an alternative network for legitimate players, released a Demigod update and most people were able to connect - but with a big catch:

Demigod also debuted with a technology internally referred to as "Super NAT". The idea was to let people be able to connect to other people without having to mess with routers or anything. And it worked great in theory. In the beta, we noticed that the connection servers required a lot of resources to do their thing quickly. No problem, we added more servers and added still more again for the release. But that turned out to have been a vast under-estimation still as it wasn't a linear progression but an exponential one.

So over the past 2 weeks, we ditched what we had and started from scratch. Late last week, because we realized that time is of the essence, the Impulse team at Stardock got assigned to the project and we began to use Impulse tech to build something new.

The new system supports Direct Connection (which is pretty traditional - port forwarding). If that fails, it will use NAT negotiation. And if that fails it'll hook up to a series of Proxy servers to handle it.

Tonight

The proxy services will not be in tonight's build because of the lateness and we don't want to put that up and then leave for the evening only to wake up in the morning, go over to Shack News or Voodoo Extreme and see a headline "Stardock's Network becomes sentient, begins world conquest!" or something. So we'll wait until Wednesday during the daylight hours to turn that part on.

We are marking this build as a BETA still since it's so late into the evening we don't want to take any chances.

Expected Results

This update isn't the end all, be all update. This week is the week of putting this pain behind us. Tonight's update is just the first step. Without the proxy, you'll still have people who will fail on the NAT and we are sure, given the sheer quantity of changes, that there will probably be some problem in there since we've had to take out most of the licensed code and replace it with Impulse code. But based on what we're seeing it should be much better for most people.

If you are one of the people who it doesn't work for, hang in there. If you are part of the majority who is having no problem with Demigod, I realize that we keep focusing on connectivity versus game enhancements or improving the Pantheon and such it's just that my first priority is to make sure everyone can play the game online as well as single player.

The team at GPG and at Stardock are already working on v1.01 which will have the kinds of new features and such our users are used to seeing in Stardock games. But we have felt it would be in bad taste to talk about new features while there are people who couldn't play online so I hope you understand why we've not been talking about that yet.

Testing

So now we’re testing it with people on the chat channels and learning lots of things that we can now pass on to you.

Below are some suggestions for connecting faster. You don't have to do them but they will make a huge difference in how fast you connect and how widely you can connect to other people.

First if your router has an SPI “firewall” you may find you have a better experience if you turn it off. SPI firewalls provide good protection against random packets coming in but the downside is that on some consumer routers, it will prevent you from directly connecting to another player forcing the NAT servers (which are far slower) to pick up the slack.

Next: You need to make sure your router is port forwarding to ports 6100 through 6200 to whatever IP address your computer is using. Don’t assume your machine is that IP address because there’s a good chance it’s not.

If you do these things right, you’ll be able to DIRECT-Connect with the new Impulse Reactor we’re releasing tonight. If you don’t, it will fail over to the new Impulse Reactor NAT negotiation system we’ve been working on the past 2 weeks which is a thousand times better than what we already have out but it will slow everyone down.

If THAT fails, then it really gets painful because then you’re going to be sent over to one of the Proxy servers. These sound great in theory and they have the nice advantage of working basically 100% of the time but it will probably take us weeks to set up enough of these to make everyone happy because we have to locate them near you otherwise lag will be high.

If you're afraid of port forwarding go here: http://www.portforward.com/

ONCE IN GAME

The next thing we’ve discovered: There is a lot of software out there now that packet sniffs. Anti-virus programs even Google Desktop. How do you know if something is sniffing packets on your system? The game will stutter – go for a couple seconds, then pause a bit, go for a couple seconds, pause, and so on. There’s not much we can do on our end to stop that. You can try lowering your graphics settings but odds are, someone you’re playing has something that’s sniffing through your packets and slowing things down. And it only takes one person in the game to have this to make it stutter for everyone.

BTW, in the 10 person game we were playing, *I* was the one with the firewall applet I had forgotten to turn off that was monitoring packets. So it can happen to the best of us.

The update status

So they’re putting it together now. It’ll still be a couple hours because of all the uploading that has to do. Everyone’s very excited.

Again: If there are any IT people hanging around reading this, I’m not a network guy but I am being told by people that the fact that the entire backend for this game has been completely re-designed and re-implemented in 2 weeks is super insane.

Once this is up, our team will be talking at length at what was learned. What I keep being told is this: What works fine for 500 people can totally fall apart for 5,000 people and that’s what we’ve run into in a nutshell for these past 2 weeks.

Known bugs

Tonight's build does have an annoying bug in that it says Sim speed is 0 for you so you can't tell how well you're running. We've informed GPG and it'll get fixed in an upcoming update.

Favor points should acrue without a problem with tonight's build as well.

+912 Karma | 159 Replies

I have the most recent beta version, I was having a lot of problems connecting last night to the point where I couldn't get into one MP game. I was doing well before any of the betas were released.

I'm kind of a sad panda...looking forward to the next round of changes to see if I can get back in the game.

Quoting Cork2,

reply 24

That was a harsh response from Frogboy. Ex shouldn't have said that, it was pretty rude. He and i am sure many others, my friends and i included, are just frustrated that we can't play this fun game which we spent money on.

I agree it's harsh and I apologize for getting on him so hard.

When you've been working the hours we have (I personally worked 91 hours last week and nearly that many hours the week before) and you combine that with the fact that WE ARE NOT THE DEVELOPER but rather the publisher that is trying to HELP THE DEVELOPER and then you see people increasingly beating up on us simply because we're there all I can say is that we're human.

The other thing that's frustrating is that a lot of the problems people have are self-inflicted. I have been on the chat channels enough and worked with enough people who simply can't be bothered to even allow Demigod to set up firewall rules on their own freeware firewall program.

I'm going to write a post that details how this ordeal started.

Quoting transitive,

reply 21

regarding the issue of the broken multiplayer connectivity at release, Brad's conduct has been exemplary of how every software company should behave. if your product doesn't work as well as you'd like to (or as well as your customers expect it to) then you need to do what Brad did and get out in public and communicate about exactly what they're doing to make it better.

regarding eX^ and Brad's stupid little argument here: poor form on both sides. mostly from eX^ though for saying something so deeply insulting and insensitive without even checking to see whether or not its true. its totally reasonable that the comments infuriated Brad. i think a private message or a forum moderator should have handled the situation though, airing all this in public leaves a bad impression.

It seems like you really did not get what I was saying in my post. After all the topics and suggestions I have made, I honestly never thought one reply would make this big of a deal or even get noticed.

Also, I convinced a fellow teammate of mine who played DoTa to get this game. I told him before he bought it the MP was not working very well, but they were putting up proxy servers in a few days to help solve the problem with connections. It has been like two weeks, we played only a couple games out of many tries and he has never played again because it kept failing to connect.

Lets all just END IT and stop feeding an ugly monster.

I will come eat you!

To Frogboy: Same back at you. I do not take things personally online so no worries.

Formatted my second pc, forwarded 6073 + 6101-6200 to main pc and 6201-6300 to second pc. No software firewalls, spi firewall off on router, etc etc. Still can rarely get into games over impulse together. Works reasonably well for me to play with random players. Very rarely, but occasionally both computers connect to games together and others can join too, so I know its not totally broken. I think if I bought a second router I could have 2 public ips since I'm using DSL, but I'm not willing to spend another $100 for something that may fix it. And the frustration continues.

[quote who="eX^" reply="15" id="2188975"]Where is this statistic? [/quote]

http://lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf

Read the presentation, there's studies and articles referenced within, it's pretty accessible.

[quote who="eX^" reply="15" id="2188975"]I personally work better at late nights and staying up til early morning. [/quote]

That's not what you were talking about, you were talking about extra hours. I've seen plenty of projects go down the crapper because people think they can just crunch until the problem goes away and that's simply not the case.

You get 3 weeks of boost and then a long tail of below average productivity that causes it to either even out or give you slightly less overall productivity.

As mentioned in the presentation, one of the biggest problems with extended crunches is that people FEEL like they're being super productive, but really they're just making a lot of haste to achieve very little speed. It's no good finding the fix a day earlier if you make mistakes and add enough bugs to cause another week of work

OK in the picture you posted it says to uncheck multicast filtering. On my Sonicwall router I don't have this option, I do however have the option "Enable Multicasting" <------- Should i Enable? Thx!

It just seems like Filter Multicasting is the opposite of enabling it... I could be wrong

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 2

Quoting Cork2, reply 24That was a harsh response from Frogboy. Ex shouldn't have said that, it was pretty rude. He and i am sure many others, my friends and i included, are just frustrated that we can't play this fun game which we spent money on.

I agree it's harsh and I apologize for getting on him so hard.

When you've been working the hours we have (I personally worked 91 hours last week and nearly that many hours the week before) and you combine that with the fact that WE ARE NOT THE DEVELOPER but rather the publisher that is trying to HELP THE DEVELOPER and then you see people increasingly beating up on us simply because we're there all I can say is that we're human.

The other thing that's frustrating is that a lot of the problems people have are self-inflicted. I have been on the chat channels enough and worked with enough people who simply can't be bothered to even allow Demigod to set up firewall rules on their own freeware firewall program.

I'm going to write a post that details how this ordeal started.

Yea that must stink, which it didn't have to be that way. But I appreciate all the hard work and that you are communicating with us and helping us. This is one of the reasons why my friends and I like this company. You communicate with us and let us know what’s going on.

Yeah my favor points are stuck at 80 and havnt gone up in the last 20 or so multiplayer games any ideah on what i should do?

Quoting Ixipwnz,

reply 8

Yeah my favor points are stuck at 80 and havnt gone up in the last 20 or so multiplayer games any ideah on what i should do?

I wouldn't worry too much about it as the last I heard they're going to wipe them once they've verified things are working right.

The Forums Are Now Closed!

The content will remain as a historical reference, thank you.

Demigod: A new day